Anyone else hope & Pray that FAN will not do what Fat Frank has done?? or ?? will History just repeat itself all over YET!! Again. Oh well!!, back to lurking!!!
By: warlockkiller
21 Jan 2007
on May 3, 2006, less than a year after the launch, the staff received an e-mail terminating their employment due to the network?s inability to pay salaries. For the next two weeks, behind-the-scenes attempts to revive QTN continued, but the May 3 memo proved to be the last word. The story of QTN is a story of incompetence, greed, and possible criminal fraud, resulting in what some are calling the ?gay Enron.? At the center of it is a man named Frank Olsen, a former Seattle bar owner with a shady past whom one associate referred to as ?the Jabba the Hutt of gay media.?
according to sources inside QTN, mismanagement was rampant from the beginning. Decisions were made no more than 24 hours in advance to broadcast live from pride events or Halloween events, resulting in producers? paying double or even triple to rent equipment and live trucks. Scores of attractive 20-somethings chattered busily on headsets as they were shuffled from job to job within the network, in search of something they could not screw up.
?People were promoted up,? Jett says. ?They were hired to produce, and they were unable to produce, so they were made executives. There were people on the payroll who I never had any idea what they did.?
One QTN investor, who also asked not to be named, laughs as he talks about two of the network?s executives, vice president Scott Withers and senior executive vice president Alexis Fish: ?Scott Withers was a store manager at Blockbuster before Frank Olsen hired him, and Alexis Fish ran errands on The Apprentice.? He pauses to check a memo on salaries. ?Withers was making $29,300 a month, and Fish was making $11,300 a month.?
When an audit due on November 22 failed to materialize, investors grew nervous. While most people inside the walls of QTN were unaware of what was happening, Frank Olsen?s past was catching up with him.
A Shady Character
On investor message boards, word of Olsen?s felony-theft conviction in Washington state in 1986 was making the rounds, along with copies of his arrest report and conviction record. At the QTN studios, producers were hearing from vendors and it was clear that something was going wrong. A memo dated December 2005 detailed over $2.5 million in unpaid bills.
